In January 2016, Popular Mechanics paid a visit to the Smithsonian's Museum Support Center in Suitland, Maryland. It's a facility that the public rarely gets to see, and Pyenson is the keeper of these artifacts. The crowning jewel of the complex is theMarine Mammal Collection, the largest and most comprehensive of its kind in the world. Pyenson, the paleontologist and curator of these fossil marine mammals, keeps track of a hundreds of thousands of artifacts and specimens saved for future museum exhibits. However, many of them will stay right here, eternally stored inthe nation's climate-controlled attic.

Although these creatures departed Earth years ago, their bones are still very much alive, helping to unlock secrets of our oceans' past. "If you want to know how the world might be," Pyenson says, "you need to know how the world was."

Nick Pyenson with an ancient blue whale skull.

Matt Blitz

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A Great Democratizing Force

But to rebuild the past, Pyenson and his team rely on technology of the future—3D modeling and digitization, a technology frequently used in big budget films, video games, and on the faces of American presidents. Pyenson tells Popular Mechanics that this technique is one of the biggest "revolutions" in the natural sciences in this century.

Because of Chile's federally mandated deadline to finish the highway project, the team had little time and not enough resources to remove the fragile and enormous specimens—some longer than an entire school bus. It was in that moment that Pyenson made a decision that would forever alter the way he would study fossils.

A digitized scan of marine mammal fossil uncovered in Caldera, Chile in 2011.

For Pyenson, though, there's something just as important as the scientific conclusions they reached. Specifically, that all of their work—the 3D modeling, photos, research papers, maps, and 360 visualizations—were uploaded online and accessible for all amateur scientists around the world. If you had a 3D printer, you too could print your very own 9-million-year-old whale fossil. "[Our] ability to do this increases the visibility and accessibility of the [work] we do," says Pyenson. "It's a great democratizing force."

Olivier Douliery

Every Good Revolution Needs Its Tools

Five years later, back in his bone-filled lab, Pyenson has become an even bigger believer in the digitization of science. What started as a "technical solution to a scientific problem" has become his modus operandi. Today, every specimen, sample, and piece of data that comes across his desk is digitized in some manner, whether through 3D printing, 2D photographs, or metadata including descriptions of who collected the objects, where they were collected, and any field notes."These objects only have scientific significance when we know that context," says Pyenson. "Objects stripped of context are extremely unhelpful."

Pyenson has long since upgraded from the technologically archaic Canon 5D camera he once use. One of the most important pieces of gear is the Artec Eva scanner (pictured at the top) for capturing and generating 3D models—the very machine used to capture President Obama in 2014. With a white light 3D scanner, the Eva captures three-dimensional geometry by projecting a structured, checkered light grid onto the object and "reading" the grid's resulting deformation with a high-speed camera. How the light distorts is how the shape is determined, producing the equivalent X, Y, Z coordinates in the corresponding software.

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The scanner works much like a souped-up Xbox Kinect with better optics and a much higher speed camera. This CCD camera can capture an image nearly instantaneously, in 0.0002 seconds to be exact. That's much faster than a human—much less a fossil that's been dead for thousands of years—could ever move.

Hospital-grade CT scanners, giant humming machine usually used to diagnose brain illness and injury, also peer inside the bones' internal structure. This helps answer questions like how these ancient marine mammals could hear, smell, or see. These scanners sometimes eliminate the laborious and risky process of separating rock from bone. Instead, CT scans penetrate the rock and other materials to capture a 3D image that can then be printed again and again.

However, one of the CT scanners that Pyenson uses isn't quite like the one you'd find at your local medical clinic. He has access to one of the largest micro CT machines on the east coast, provided as in-kind donation of services and scanning time by the military contractor NTS Chesapeake. This large-scale X-ray scanner can fill a 10-foot-by-20-foot room and is incredibly useful when studying ancient blue whale skulls—which, as you'd imagine, are quite large.

No Whale Left Behind

Much like his predecessors—researchers like Spencer Fullerton Baird and Frederick W. True—Pyenson says his main responsibility is being a steward for this collection and ensuring that all the specimens are still here and being used another 150 years. It's the driving reason why he constantly searches for ways to preserve this knowledge and stem the loss of information—"one of the great enemies of museum science," says Pyenson.

With 3D modeling, open-access information, and CT scanning, these tools make sure knowledge is as well-preserved as the fossils themselves. But despite years of work, Pyenson estimates that less than one percent of the collection has been digitized, mostly because of the specimens themselves. Vertebrate fossils come in an extreme variety of sizes that don't neatly match a "one-size-fits-all digitization process." Many objects are so large, around the size of a truck, that the process can become incredibly time-consuming. They just don't have the means to do it all while also doing daily research.

"If you want to know how the world might be, you need to know how the world was."

But Pyenson is in constant communications with other institutions about creating better workflows, processes, tools while other colleagues consider applying for NSF funding.

Once the world's greatest collection of marine mammal bones become more readily available to the public there will be a giant leap forward in scientific discovery, Pyenson says.